Study Tools

Native Son

Richard Wright

Book Three (part three)

Important Quotations Explained

From the beginning of Max’s speech through the end
of the novel

Summary

In the courtroom, Max presents his case. He argues that
Bigger is a “test symbol” who embodies and exposes the ills of American
society. Max explains that his intent is not to argue whether an
injustice has been committed, but to make the court understand Bigger
and the conditions that have created him. Max points out that the authorities
have deliberately inflamed public opinion against Bigger, using
his case as an excuse to terrorize the black community, labor groups,
and the Communist Party into submission.

Max goes on to say that the rage directed at Bigger stems
from a mix of guilt and fear. Those who clamor for Bigger’s swift
execution secretly know that their own privileges have been gained
through historical wrongs committed against people like Bigger,
and that their wealth has been accumulated through the oppression
of others. Bigger’s options have been so limited, and his life so
controlled, that he has been unable to do anything but hate those
who have profited from his misery. Stunted and deformed by this
oppression, Bigger was unable to view Mary and Jan as human beings.
Max argues that the Daltons, despite their philanthropy, are blind
to the world that has created Bigger and have themselves created
the conditions that led to their daughter’s murder.

Max warns that killing Bigger quickly will not restrain
others like him. Rather, these other blacks will only become angrier
that the powerful, rich, white majority limits their opportunities.
Popular culture dangles happiness and wealth before the oppressed,
but such goals are always kept out of reach in reality. Max argues
that this smoldering anger born out of restricted opportunities—though now
tempered by the effects of religion, alcohol, and sex—will eventually
burst forth and destroy all law and order in American society. By
limiting the education of blacks, segregating them, and oppressing
them, white society itself is implicated in Mary’s murder. Max claims
that white society “planned the murder of Mary Dalton” but now denies
it. He says that his job is to show how foolish it is to try to
seek revenge on Bigger.

Max argues that Bigger murdered Mary accidentally, without
a plan, but that he accepted his crime, which gave him the opportunities
of choice and action, and the sense that his actions finally meant something.
Bigger’s killing was thus not an act against an individual, but
a defense against the world in which Bigger has lived. Mary died because
she did not understand that she alone could not undo hundreds of
years of oppression. Max points to the gallery, where blacks and
whites are seated in separate sections. Blacks, he says, live in
a separate “captive” nation within America, unable to determine
the course of their own lives. He argues that such a lack of self-realization
is just as smothering and stunting as physical starvation. Bigger
sought a new life, Max says, and found it accidentally when he murdered
Mary. Max argues that Bigger had no motive for the crimes and that
the murders were “as instinctive and inevitable as breathing or
blinking one’s eyes.” The hate and fear society has bred into Bigger
are an inextricable part of his personality, and essentially his
only way of living.

Max says that there are millions more like Bigger and
that, if change does not come, these conditions could lead to another
civil war. He says he knows the court does not have the power to
rectify hundreds of years of wrongs in one day, but that it can
at least show that it recognizes that there is a problem. Prison,
he says, would be a step up for Bigger. Though Bigger would be known
only as a number in prison, he would at least have an identity there.
Finally, Max argues that the court cannot kill Bigger because it
has never actually recognized that he exists. He urges the court
to give Bigger life. Bigger does not entirely understand Max’s speech,
but is proud that Max has worked so hard to save him.

After Max’s arguments, Buckley declares that Bigger does
in fact have a motive for Mary’s murder. Buckley claims that since
Bigger and Jack masturbated while watching a newsreel about Mary
the same day she was killed, Bigger must have been sexually interested in
her. Buckley tells the courtroom that Bigger was a “maddened ape”
who raped Mary, killed her, and burned her body to hide the evidence.
Buckley concludes his argument by saying that Bigger was sullen
and resentful from the start, not even grateful when he was referred
to Mr. Dalton for a job. Buckley calls Bigger a “demented savage”
who deserves to die, and whose execution will prove that “jungle
law” does not prevail in Chicago. The court adjourns. After a brief
deliberation, the judge returns and sentences Bigger to death.

Max visits Bigger again after a failed attempt to obtain
a pardon from the governor. Bigger tries to explain how much Max’s
questions about his life meant to him, as these questions acknowledged Bigger’s
existence as a human being, even as a murderer. Max tries to comfort
Bigger, but Bigger wants understanding, not pity. He continues,
saying that sometimes he wishes Max had not asked the questions,
because they have made him think and this thinking has scared him.
The questions have made Bigger consider himself and other people
in a new way, and have caused him to realize that his motivation
for hurting people was simply that they were always crowding him.
He did not mean to hurt others, but it just happened. When
Bigger committed the murders, he was not trying to kill anyone, but
rather to make his life mean something that he could claim for himself.
Bigger asks Max if this sense of meaning is the same reason that
the authorities want to kill him. Max urges his client to die free,
believing in himself. He tells Bigger that only his own mind stands
in the way of believing in himself. The rich majority dehumanizes
people like Bigger for the same reason Bigger could not see the
majority as human—they each just want to justify their own lives.

Bigger tells Max he does believe in himself. He did not
want to kill, but there was something in him that has made him kill
and that something must be good. He tells Max that he feels all
right when he looks at it this way. Max is horrified at Bigger’s
words, but Bigger assures him that he is all right. Max bids him
good-bye and as he leaves, Bigger asks him, “Tell . . . Tell Mister
. . . Tell Jan hello.”

Analysis

In his long courtroom speech, Max articulates much of
what Bigger has already seen and felt throughout the novel. He reiterates
the Daltons’ blindness and Bigger’s blindness toward Mary and Jan.
He tells the court how the murders gave Bigger the identity he lacked and
how the hate and fear that Bigger’s living conditions bred into him
made the murders almost inevitable. While much of Max’s speech simply
restates what we have seen before, it does clarify the warning Wright
implies with the ringing of the alarm clock at the novel’s opening.
Max worries that the same doom Bigger dreads in Book One is the
fate of the entire country. Max appeals to the court—as Wright appeals
to his readers in 1930s America—to recognize
Bigger Thomas, to understand the conditions that have created him,
and to comprehend the disastrous consequences of allowing these
conditions to continue.

Many critics have argued that Wright uses Max’s speech
merely to expose his own communist propaganda. Others, however,
have pointed out that Max, though a lawyer for the Communist Party,
is never identified as a member of the Party himself. Also, Max’s
argument does not follow the party line exactly. Max does make clear that
blacks have been oppressed for hundreds of years, and details the
conditions under which they are forced to live in 1930s
Chicago. His argument does not, however, appear to be a call for
revolution or an attack on capitalism. Instead, Max makes an appeal
to the rich and powerful simply to understand that they are sowing
the seeds for a new civil war in continuing their oppression of
blacks. In the end, Max, as a representative of the Communist Party,
cannot save Bigger. Bigger learns that salvation can come only from
within, through his own effort.

In a novel filled with characters who are blind both
literally and metaphorically, Max sees the most clearly. He is able
to understand and articulate much of Bigger’s life after only one
long conversation with him. Max sees that Bigger views whites not
as individuals, but as a great natural force. He understands Bigger’s
split consciousness and sees how Bigger was forced to retreat from
reality. He also understands how Mary’s murder gave Bigger the chance
to control his own life for the first time. For all his perceptiveness,
however, Max is still unable to see Bigger completely. At the trial,
he refers to Bigger as a symbol and talks of the millions more who
are like him. In this statement, we see that Max understands Bigger,
but that he cannot see Bigger beyond his own conception of who Bigger
must be. When Bigger tells Max that he is pleased with what he has
done, Max is unable to accept this assertion and gropes for his
hat “like a blind man.” Even Max is unable, ultimately, to see Bigger
fully for the individual he is.

Critics, such as James Baldwin in Everybody’s
Protest Novel, have argued that Bigger goes to his death
fearful and desperate, just like the rat in the first pages of the
novel. Others contend that Bigger finally gives himself over to
hatred. Nonetheless, it is important to note that Bigger does change
in jail, accepting that the acts he has committed are part of who
he is, but also that hate for one’s oppressors is a natural feeling.
It is the repression of these feelings—a repression Bigger has forced
upon himself in order to survive—that leads to his violent acts.
By the end of the novel, he has shed his hate and fear, and longs
only to understand his place in the world and his relation to other
people. Bigger tells Max again and again that he is all right. Finally,
as Max is leaving, Bigger asks him to “[t]ell Jan hello.” As Jan
requests in the beginning of the novel, Bigger finally calls him
by his first name, signifying that he finally sees whites as individuals,
rather than a looming force. Even more important, Bigger sees himself
as the whites’ equal. Max exhorts Bigger to believe in himself,
and we have every indication at this point to believe that he already
does.

Racism is a prison to both the patient and the agent, it is pepper thrown to the African wound but also puffs back to the White's eyes, they in turn all feel the sweetness in their different bodies,...